A Fancy Job
by Smitheriness
Summary: That was one name for it he supposed... Musings by Gale after Mockingjay.


**A/N: I love Gale. I was rooting for him from the very beginning. It was abundantly clear to me that Katniss and Gale are soulmates. Unfortunatly Suzanne Collins did not agree... I like Peeta very much, he is wonderful, maybe too wonderful for Katniss, but he is a boy Katniss learned to love whereas she loved Gale from the beginning. I am OK with her ending up with Peeta, they are not my books or characters, I am however outraged that Gale's ending was "He has a fancy job in District 2". He was far too important to be dismissed in such a manner. This is by no means an ending for him but I offer it nonetheless.**

A fancy job in District 2. That was one name for it he supposed. It had all the fixings of a fancy job, certainly a grand office and a full supply of unearned respect. Gale stood at the window behind his desk overlooking the square. It was teeming with workers constructing a monument to immortalize those in District 2 who had died during the rebellion.

"No," Gale silently chastised himself for his mistake, "the people I killed during the rebellion." He turned his back on the window suddenly bitter, thinking of the faceless, nameless people he could add to the list. It was a long list, he knew, but if he was to be honest with himself, there was only one name he truly would give anything, everything, to erase: "Prim…"

Just thinking the name resulted in a visceral reaction. His knees gave out and all the blood drained from his face as he crumpled to the floor. Gale took deep breaths in an attempt to slow his heart enough to prevent it from racing back to the memories he knew he could not handle – "not here, not now." Once he had gained enough composure to rise from the floor, he transferred himself to the seat at his desk. A memo caught his eye and Gale forced himself to read it repeatedly until he could comprehend what it said. It took him four attempts before he had enough control to slowly stand and leave his office, and his fancy job, for the rest of the day.

His feet knew where he was going before his brain. He found himself in the woods, sitting on a fallen tree, without ever deciding to go there. He accepted the protection of the solitude gratefully knowing that a breakdown was unavoidable. It had been months since he had allowed himself to picture the face of the girl who may as well have been his little sister. With the guarantee of his isolation, he reveled in his memories of her smiling face, surrounded by messy blonde hair; of her blue eyes, uncommon in the Seam and therefore all the more striking, so wise and understanding. Gale allowed his tears to fall as the wave of memories engulfed him. It ripped away the illusion of 'fine' he had carefully created revealing his raw guilt and sorrow. He tried to smile at the happy moments: the day Prim had received her goat and the many days she had made Katniss late for hunting by making her take the long way home so she could look at the cakes in the bakery window. Her pride when she described a patient she helped her mother to cure. These sweet memories were overshadowed by the bitter memory of how surprisingly strong she had felt when he had pulled her, screaming, off of Katniss that day. Her shrieks rang in his ears still.

"Katniss…" another name he rarely allowed himself to think. His sobs doubled in strength. His best friend, his soul mate, his Catnip. So remarkably different from her sweet, trusting sister but all the more matched to him because of it. He treasured the recollections of their friendship: the first time she had lit up his life with a smile, the softening in her voice when she spoke about Prim, the single memory of her father she had shared with him. Without prompting his brain conjured the image of her face that day: her dark hair, released from its braid allowing the sun to dry it after a swim, framing her face. Her gray eyes showing a weariness from the immense burden she had shouldered since her father's death, it had been the only time he had seen her so vulnerable; but to him, she had never looked so beautiful as in that moment. His mind flicked through the countless moments when gray eyes met gray, savoring each connection as proof…

"Proof of what?" Gale asked himself disdainfully. "Proof that once, before, they had known and understood each other." For a long time he had thought that it was Katniss who had changed the game, changed in The Games, changed and left him alone. It had taken Prim's… Prim for him to realize that it was he who had changed on her, leaving nothing in her world constant. Katniss had been doing what she had always done, what they had always done: surviving. He was the one who had decided he did not want to live without her.

Regret and loss left Gale curled in a ball on the floor of an unfamiliar forest, completely alone but for the memories of everything he had destroyed.

A fancy job in District 2. He supposed, if an office makes a job fancy… But in that moment Gale realized that to him it meant nothing. He had had a fancy job in District 12. In District 12 his job was to protect the sweet, trusting girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. He had failed. Failed her, failed them.


End file.
